Searching for the Just City

Date: Saturday, April 29, 2006, 9.30am - 6:00pm

Location: Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Attendance is free and open to the general public.

Urban planning, despite its many inherent contradictions, represents a discipline that has been strongly influenced by a belief in social change and a desire to either diminish or eradicate the manifold inequalities that characterize cities and the societies in which they are embedded. Susan Fainsteins' concept of the "Just City" encourages planners and policy makers to embrace a normative approach to urban planning that combines progressive planners' earlier focus on equity and material well-being with more recent concerns such as diversity, participation, and sustainability to attaining a better quality of human and urban life within the context of a global capitalist political economy. Organized by Columbia University's Urban Planning doctoral students, this one-day conference "Searching for the Just City" aims to recognize Susan Fainstein for her contributions as a Professor and Director of Columbia's Urban Planning program, to honor her scholarly contributions as one of the leading urban theorists of the present day, and to critically discuss the question of whether her -- or any other -- vision of the "Just City" can guide future planners to make cities a better place.


Participants include:

Eddie Bautista (Deputy Director of the Mayor's Office of City Legislative Affairs and Special Advisor to the Deputy Mayor for Government Affairs), Bob Beauregard (The New School), Eugenie Birch (UPenn), Adolfo Carrion Jr. (Bronx Borough President), Diane E. Davis (MIT), Susan Fainstein (Columbia and Harvard Universities), Frank Fischer (Rutgers University), David Harvey (CUNY Graduate Center), Dolores Hayden (Yale University), John Logan (Brown University), Setha Low (CUNY Graduate Center), Peter Marcuse(Columbia University), John Mollenkopf (CUNY Graduate Center), Elliot Sclar (Columbia University), J. Phillip Thompson (MIT), and Laura Wolf-Powers (Pratt Institute).

Sponsors include:
Department of Urban Studies, Barnard College; Center for Urban Research and Policy, Columbia University; Columbia Society of Urbanists; Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University